This section introduces aspects that may be helpful in facilitating a better understanding of the invention. Accordingly, the statements of this section are to be read in this light and are not to be understood as admissions about what is in the prior art or what is not in the prior art.
For efficiently providing broadband communication services to very high mobility passengers (e.g. in airplanes, trains, etc.) those passengers should be allowed to use their own regular communication devices (phones, laptop cards, etc.). Spectrum efficiency in the communication from a base station to a mobile station and vice versa should be high to offer real broadband services and to keep the number of base stations and/or required transmission resources (e.g. licensed spectrum) low while serving a large number of high-velocity vehicles (e.g. airplanes, trains) at the same time.
Moreover, it is preferable to reuse standardized hardware constructed for classical cellular mobile communications as much as possible in order to keep production costs low and in order to offer a solution which is separable from existing standards and products of a specific vendor.
Such a system may be a cellular system that uses base station antennas with broad main lobes in the antenna characteristics to cover large portions of a cell. The mobile stations use network coupling in order to connect to an inner pico-cell inside the high mobility transportation object (e.g. airplane, train). This pico-cell can be a multi-standard cell, supporting e.g. GSM, WLAN, UMTS etc. Alternatively or in addition, it is also possible to provide a wire-line (cable) connection to end-user terminals (used by passengers, crew, etc.) inside the high mobility transportation object.
The multiple-access scheme for serving a number of high-velocity vehicles would be a time-division multiple-access (TDMA) scheme, or a frequency-division multiple-access (FDMA) scheme, or a combination of both. However, these multiple-access schemes do not account for the spatial separation of the served high-velocity vehicles within one cell. Thus, these schemes do not reach the theoretically possible spectrum efficiency.
Moreover, existing standard mobile communication hardware and software has to be modified in order to cope with the very high velocities of moving mobile stations in trains and airplanes. The drawback here is that separability of such a mobility solution may not be given anymore. This means e.g. that the development of such a high-mobility add-on solution and of the standard cellular solution cannot be separated which may lead to increased cost and ties the high-mobility solution to a particular product for a particular mobile communication standard.
It is an object of the invention to provide: a method, a base station, a mobile station, and a communications system allowing for provisioning of efficient mobile communications.